Page:The English Peasant.djvu/133

 the emergency, applies the stomach-pump, and the poisoned infants come round.

Supposing they clear this danger and grow up, the habit thus induced often stays with them for life. It is well known that in no part of England is there such a quantity of this drug consumed as in the Fen-land. Wholesale druggists report that they send immense quantities into these districts, and retail druggists often dispense as much as 200 lbs. a year. It is sold in pills or penny sticks, and a thriving shop will serve 300 or 400 customers on a Saturday night, the largest consumers being the inhabitants of small hamlets or isolated cottages in the fens.

It is true that this is a report of a state of things which existed ten years ago in the fens; but it cannot be supposed a practice so widely spread should suddenly have ceased. In a late report, that of 1867, Mr Ellis, a surgeon at Crowle, in the Isle of Axholme, says: "The mothers leave their children to go out to work; even children that are suckling are left a whole day—often thirty-five children in the charge of one old woman. Sometimes they give them Godfrey (opium) to keep them quiet while they are out. Twins and illegitimate children almost always die. I know a case here where a woman has had five or six children, all of whom have died, having been given opium to keep them quiet." And when the writer was in Spalding last autumn, he was told more opium was sold there than in any part of the kingdom. Under such a system none but the strong live, and wretched as in a moral sense their companionship in daily labour too often is, it is probable, on the whole, that the open air and constant exercise prove the very best restorative these poor little ones can have, and cause many to grow up, in spite of such terrible odds, strong men and women.

As soon, too, as they can work they get enough to eat. To this end they are sent to work as young as a master will employ them, and each generation repeats its parents' experience, beginning a little earlier, and growing more and more insubordinate than the last.

As to the boys, they soon learn to master their mothers, and will not go to school even when the winter months come on and there is not such a demand for their labour. The grossest ignorance accordingly prevails.